The Demon King Read Free Page B

emanating from him, pulsing with every beat of
his now inhuman heart as if he’d been born with it. Well, I suppose he was born with it, Will told himself. If what they said was true –
and Steven Lazarus was the bastard child of Marius, the previous
Akyri King.
    But not even Marius had ever felt like this.
Not even close.
    No, there’s something more
to you, Will thought, and his green gaze
narrowed further. He wondered just how much more there was to the good
detective. Was there enough there that the man could be trouble? If
it was something
old he was detecting, then that was a distinct
possibility.
    He knew he was staring, but that was
something else about Time. It could do whatever the hell it wanted.
And the Akyri King was distracted anyway; he had no idea he was
being so closely observed.
    Quite suddenly, the Akyri King looked up and
met William’s gaze. A hard stillness moved through them both, and
Will felt the man’s power move in front of him like an invisible
wall.
    William’s brow
lifted. Interesting .
    *****
     
    Laz had barely hit his thirties, but he
genuinely felt ancient just then. It didn’t help that he didn’t
even have a place to go home to, where he could take off his
jacket, grab a beer, and switch on the VIVE to disappear into some
3d real-as-hell fairy world. His partner was currently staying with
him. Ray Baxter was a shifter, and his girlfriend was a human. Most
times, the discrepancy wasn’t an issue, but apparently they’d begun
fighting about something else entirely, and of course the obvious
differences in a couple – race, background, parents, and in
Baxter’s case, species – always came into play eventually when
lovers were pissed at each other. The fight had escalated, and now
she was in the process of moving out. While she did that, Baxter
was crashing at Laz’s place.
    Laz was just betting the
other detective was enjoying the hell out of the VIVE. Laz had
saved up for four paychecks to buy the virtual reality device. For
short, he called it virtuality . For a cop living on a
cop’s wages, even that of the BPD’s head detective, his VIVE was
one of Laz’s most prized possessions. Of course… it didn’t have to
be. As an Akyri, and as the king of the Akyri, Laz could have
conjured up all the money he’d wanted. He didn’t even have to make
it a material conjuring. He could just switch the numbers in a few
electronic bank accounts, and voila – he was filthy, stinking rich.
Anyone started to ask questions, they could be dealt with by order
of a few mind control and mind erasing spells. All in all, Laz had
the world in his hands, just as did every king sitting at the Table
of the Thirteen.
    But first and foremost in Laz’s mind, he was
a cop. As a police officer, not to mention a leader of an entire
nation of supernatural beings, what kind of example would he be
setting? Besides, there was little Laz really wanted in the world.
Little in the material sense, that is.
    A queen….
    Like so many thoughts these days, that one
came without warning and without invitation. He was not a lonely
man. His bed was kept warm most nights, any night he felt like
having it warmed. So what the hell did he want with a queen? Why
would it be important to him? He had enough to deal with at that
moment, without having to impress some woman that fate decided he’d
be saddled with.
    In short, the world was
going to hell. As a cop and as a man and as one who’d been human most his life, Laz
felt disillusioned, tired, and weary of all that was around him. He
was somewhere in-between the stages of being genuinely disgusted by
the state of things and giving up on caring about it altogether.
Was he supposed to feel this way? So young? Wasn’t it usually the
eighty-year-old man who poked people in the chest with his cane and
said “bah humbug?”
    The truth was he couldn’t
even stand to glance in the mirror any longer. In the mornings, he
used his electric shaver to shave without looking,